Increased trade and communication between Asian and European countries during the late nineteenth century caused a cultural collision; both East and West experienced change as a result of reciprocal influences. Asian art provided European and North American artists and designers with approaches to space, color, drawing conventions, and subject matter that were radically unlike Western traditions. This revitalized graphic design during the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The influence of ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world” and defines an art movement of Japan’s Tokugawa period (1603–67). This epoch was the final phase of traditional Japanese history; it was a time of economic expansion, internal stability, and flourishing cultural arts. Fearful of the potential impact of European colonial expansion and Christian missionaries on Japanese culture, the shogun (a military governor whose power exceeded the emperor’s) issued three decrees in the 1630s excluding foreigners and adopted an official policy of national seclusion. Japanese citizens were barred from traveling overseas or returning from abroad; foreign trade was restricted to approved Dutch and Chinese traders sailing to the Nagasaki seaport. During this period of national isolation, Japanese art acquired a singular national character with few external influences.
Ukiyo-e blended the realistic narratives of emaki (traditional picture scrolls) with influences from decorative arts. The earliest ukiyo-e works were screen paintings depicting the entertainment districts—called “the floating world”—of Edo (modern Tokyo) and other cities. Scenes and actors from Kabuki theatrical plays, renowned courtesans and prostitutes, and erotica were early subjects.
Ukiyo-e artists quickly embraced the woodblock print. Hishikawa Moronobu (1618–94) is widely respected as the first master of the ukiyo-e print (Fig. 11–1). This son of a provincial embroiderer began his career by making designs for embroidery. After moving to Edo in the middle of the seventeenth century, Moronobu became a book illustrator who used Chinese woodcut techniques and reached a large audience. In addition to actors and courtesans, his work presented the everyday life of ordinary people, including crowds on the street and peddlers. Prints surpassed screen paintings in importance as artists exploited a growing interest in images depicting urban life.
Japanese woodblock prints were a careful collaboration between publisher, artist, block cutter, and printer. The publisher financed the production of a print and coordinated the work of the other three partners. The artist supplied a separate drawing for each color. These were pasted onto woodblocks, and the negative or white areas were cut away, destroying the original drawing in the process. After all the blocks for a print were cut, printing began. Water-based inks and subtle blends were used, requiring great skill and speed by the printers. Only after all colors were printed could the artist see the whole design.
Working within an evolving tradition, several Japanese artists made major contributions to the genre. Okumura Masanobu (1686–1764) was among the first artists to move from hand-coloring single-color woodcuts to two-color printing, and Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725–70) introduced full-color prints from numerous blocks, each printed in a different color, in 1765.
Contemporaries of Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) heralded him as an unrivaled artist in portraying beautiful women; he has been called the supreme poet of the Japanese print. His loving observation of nature and human expression resulted in prints of insects, birds, flowers, and women possessing great beauty and tenderness (Fig. 11–2). His images of Edo’s most renowned beauties were identified by name. Rather than repeating stereotypes of conventional beauty, Utamaro conveyed his subjects’ feelings, based on careful observation of their physical expressions, gestures, and emotional states. His warm yellow and tan backgrounds emphasized delicate, lighter-toned skin.
In 1804 Utamaro was jailed for three days and then forced to wear handcuffs for fifty days, after making prints depicting the wife and concubines of deposed military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi. This crushed his spirit and his work declined; two years after this torture Utamaro died, at age fifty-three.
The most renowned and prolific ukiyo-e artist was Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), who produced an estimated thirty-five thousand works during seven decades of ceaseless artistic creation. In his teens Hokusai worked at a lending bookstore and was apprenticed to a woodblock engraver before turning to drawing and painting. At age nineteen his first published prints of Kabuki actors appeared. Hokusai’s work spanned the gamut of ukiyo-e subjects: album prints; genre scenes; historical events; illustrations for novels; landscape series including views of rivers, mountains, waterfalls, and bridges; nature studies of flowers, birds, shells, and fish; paintings on silk; sketchbooks; and privately commissioned prints for special occasions, called surimono. His model books for amateur artists were very popular, as were his caricatures of occupations, customs, and social behavior.
Book illustration was a major form of popular art. Hokusai, like most ukiyo-e artists, began his career illustrating yellow-backs—cheap novelettes so named for the color of their covers—then moved into illustrations for the major novelists of the day. From age twenty until the year of his death, Hokusai illustrated over 270 titles, including several books of his art (Fig. 11–3), among them Hokusai Gashiki (Hokusai’s Drawing Style, 1819) and Hokusai Soga (Hokusai’s Rough Sketches, 1820). These were produced both in black and white and in three colors. Japanese book illustrators developed a superb feeling for the kinetic rhythm of a book, using scale, density, texture, and dramatic action to achieve a dynamic sequence of images.
Single-leaf polychrome prints were considered the summit of ukiyo-e art. Hokusai, who called himself “the old man mad with painting,” produced numerous suites of prints. He was in his seventies when he designed the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fig. 11–4). Mount Fuji occupies a special place in Japanese culture; the ancient Japanese were sun worshippers, and this 3,776-meter volcano is the first place in Japan to catch the rising sun’s rays. Hokusai’s Mount Fuji prints took the Japanese landscape print to a high level of expression through the grandeur of their conception and their inventive portrayal of natural forms. They depict the external appearances of nature and symbolically interpret the vital energy forces found in the sea, winds, and clouds.
Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858) was the last great master of the Japanese woodcut. A rival of Hokusai, he inspired the European impressionists with his brilliant spatial composition and ability to capture the transient moments of the landscape. In the series Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido, Hiroshige illustrated the fifty-three way stations (Fig. 11–5) along the Eastern Sea Road from Edo to Kyoto, capturing subtle nuances of light, atmosphere, and season. He not only observed and captured the poetic splendor of nature but related it to the lives of ordinary people as well. This is seen in the brilliant spatial compositions of the series Famous Places in Edo: A Hundred Views (Fig. 11–6). Hiroshige’s death during an 1858 cholera epidemic came as the collision of Asian and European cultures was about to have a major influence on Western art and design. The treaties resulting from American commodore Matthew C. Perry’s naval expeditions to Japan, beginning in 1853, led to the collapse of Japan’s traditional isolationist policies and opened trade with the West. A revolution overthrew the last shogun in 1867 and restored supreme power to the Meiji emperor the following year. Japan’s leaders began building a modern nation with economic and military similarities to Western nations. A centralized constitutional government, industrialization, and a strong military were developed.
The late nineteenth-century Western mania for all things Japanese is called Japonisme. Japanese artifacts streamed into Europe, and several books on Japanese art and ornament were published during the 1880s. Although ukiyo-e practitioners were considered mere artisans in Japan, they captivated European artists, who drew inspiration from the calligraphic line drawing, abstraction and simplification of natural appearances, flat color and silhouettes, unconventional use of bold black shapes, and decorative patterns. Subjects often became emblematic symbols, reduced to graphic interpretations conveying their essence. Landscape and interior environments were frequently presented as suggestive impressions rather than detailed depictions. Too often, ukiyo-e has been venerated for its catalytic impact on Western art rather than for its independent major achievements in graphic illustration and design.
Art nouveau
A direct corollary of the Arts and Crafts movement, art nouveau was an international decorative style that thrived during roughly the two decades (c. 1890–1910) that girded the turn of the century. It encompassed all the design arts—architecture, furniture and product design, fashion, and graphics—and consequently embraced posters, packages, and advertisements; teapots, dishes, and spoons; chairs, door frames, and staircases; factories, subway entrances, and houses. Art nouveau’s identifying visual quality is an organic, plantlike line. Freed from roots and gravity, it can either undulate with whiplash energy or flow with elegant grace as it defines, modulates, and decorates a given space. Vine tendrils, flowers (such as the rose and lily), birds (particularly peacocks), and the human female form were frequent motifs from which this fluid line was adapted.
The term art nouveau arose in a Paris gallery run by art dealer Samuel Bing, which opened in 1895 as the Salon de l’Art Nouveau. In addition to Japanese art, “new art” by European and American artists was displayed and sold there. This gallery became an international meeting place where many young artists were introduced, among them the American glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose work had a sizable influence in Europe.
Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design, which first appeared in 1936, was one of the first books to give art nouveau a significant position in the development of twentieth-century art and architecture. Pevsner saw the movement’s principal characteristics as “the long sensitive curve, reminiscent of the lily’s stem, an insect’s feeler, the filament of a blossom or occasionally a slender flame, the curve undulating, flowing and interplaying with others, sprouting from corners and covering asymmetrically all available surfaces.”
To dismiss art nouveau as surface decoration is to ignore its pivotal role in the evolution of all aspects of design. Art nouveau is a transitional style that evolved from the historicism that dominated design for most of the nineteenth century. By replacing this almost servile use of past forms and styles and rejecting the anachronistic approaches of the nineteenth century, art nouveau became the initial phase of the modern movement, preparing the way for the twentieth century.
This was a vital period in architecture and the applied arts, because it formed a bridge between Victorian clutter and modernism. The Victorians sought solutions through established historical approaches, while the modernists adopted a new international ornamental style, using elegant motifs aligned with nature and often distinguished by free and graceful lines. Although expressions of this new style varied from country to country, they were all part of the same family. Ideas, processes, and forms in twentieth-century art bear witness to this catalytic function. Modern architecture, graphic and industrial design, surrealism, and abstract art have roots in art nouveau’s underlying theory and concepts.
In art nouveau graphics, the organic linear movements frequently dominate the spatial area and other visual properties, such as color and texture. In earlier three-dimensional design, ornaments often were mere decorative elements applied to the surface of a building or object, but in art nouveau objects, the basic forms and shapes were formed by, and evolved with, the design of the ornament. This was a new design principle unifying decoration, structure, and intended function. Because art nouveau forms and lines were often invented rather than copied from nature or the past, there was a revitalization of the design process that pointed toward abstract art. Perhaps the seminal genius of the movement was Belgian architect Baron Victor Horta (1861–1947). His 1892 townhouse for Emile Tassel was unified by tendrilous curvilinear networks unlike anything yet seen in England or on the Continent.
During this period there was a close collaboration between visual artists and writers. The French symbolist movement in literature of the 1880s and 1890s, with its rejection of realism in favor of the metaphysical and sensuous, was an important influence and led artists to symbolic and philosophic attitudes. In a skeptical era with scientific rationalism on the rise and traditional religious beliefs and social norms under assault, art was seen as a potential vehicle to a much-needed spiritual rejuvenation. Birth, life, and growth; death and decay—these became symbolic subject matter. The complexity of this era and movement has allowed contradictory interpretations: because of its decorativeness, some observers see art nouveau as an expression of late nineteenth-century decadence; others, however, noting art nouveau’s quest for spiritual and aesthetic values, see it as a reaction against the retrogression and materialism of this epoch.
Art nouveau graphic designers and illustrators attempted to make art a part of everyday life. Their fine-arts training had educated them about art forms and methods developed primarily for aesthetic considerations. At the same time they enthusiastically embraced applied-art techniques that had evolved with the development of commercial printing processes. As a result, they were able to upgrade significantly the visual quality of mass communications. The international character of art nouveau was expedited by advances in transportation and communications technology. Contact between artists in various nations through print media and international exhibitions allowed cross-fertilization to take place. The many art periodicals of the 1890s served this purpose while simultaneously introducing the new art and design to a larger audience.
The sources often cited for art nouveau are diffuse and wide-ranging. They include William Blake’s book illustration, Celtic ornament, the rococo style, the Arts and Crafts movement, Pre-Raphaelite painting, Japanese decorative design, and especially ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Important inspiration also came from European painting in the late 1880s, which had fallen under the Asian spell. The swirling forms of Vincent Van Gogh (1853–90), the flat color and stylized organic contour of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), and the work of the Nabis group of young artists all played a role. The Nabis explored symbolic color and decorative patterns, concluding that a painting was, first of all, an arrangement of color in two-dimensional patterns.
Chéret and Grasset
The transition from Victorian graphics to the art nouveau style was a gradual one. Two graphic artists working in Paris, Jules Chéret (1836–1933) and Eugène Grasset (1841–1917), played important roles in the transition. In 1881 a new French law concerning freedom of the press lifted many censorship restrictions and allowed posters anywhere except on churches, at polls, or in areas designated for official notices. This new law led to a booming poster industry employing designers, printers, and afficheurs (billposters). The streets became an art gallery for the nation, and respected painters felt no shame at creating advertising posters. The Arts and Crafts movement was creating a new respect for the applied arts, and Jules Chéret showed the way.
Now acclaimed as the father of the modern poster, Chéret was the son of an indigent typesetter who paid four hundred francs to secure a three-year lithographic apprenticeship for his son at age thirteen. The teenager spent his weekdays lettering backwards on lithographic stones and his Sundays absorbing art at the Louvre. After completing his apprenticeship he worked as a lithographic craftsman and renderer for several firms and took drawing classes. At age eighteen he went to London but could only find work making catalogue drawings of furniture, so he returned to Paris after six months.
Chéret was convinced that pictorial lithographic posters would replace the typographic letterpress posters that filled the urban environment, but he could not convince advertisers of this. At age twenty-two he produced a blue and brown poster for Offenbach’s operetta Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) (Fig. 11–7). When further commissions were not forthcoming, he returned to London, where he soon mastered the more advanced English color lithography. A poster commission for a family of clowns he had befriended was the turning point, leading to label commissions from the philanthropist and perfume manufacturer Eugène Rimmel (1820–87). Several years of close association and friendship with Rimmel were marked by extensive design and production experience, culminating in Rimmel financing Chéret’s establishment of a printing firm in Paris in 1866. The latest English technology and custom-crafted, oversized lithographic stones were purchased, and Chéret was poised to begin the process of running letterpress typography from signboards. Still very Victorian in approach, the first poster from his shop (Fig. 11–8) was a monochromatic design for the theatrical production La biche au bois (The Doe in the Woods), starring the twenty-two-year-old Sarah Bernhardt. Both artist and actress took Paris by storm, as Bernhardt became the leading actress of her day and Chéret pioneered the visual poster.
During the 1870s Chéret evolved away from Victorian complexity, simplifying his designs and increasing the scale of his major figures and lettering. In 1881 he sold his printing company to the larger printing firm Imprimerie Chaix and became its artistic director, a move that gave him more time for art and design. He drew from a model in the mornings and spent the afternoons painting at his easel, drawing with pastels and working on his huge lithographic stones. By 1884 some Chéret posters were produced in sizes of up to 2 meters tall by printing the images in sections, which were joined on the wall by afficheurs. The total annual press run of his designs was almost two hundred thousand copies. At least eight French printers specialized in posters, and Chéret was joined by a score of other poster designers.
Chéret’s artistic influences included the idealized beauty and carefree lifestyle painted by Watteau and Fragonard, the luminous color of Turner, and the winding movement of Tiepolo, whose figures expressed energy and movement through twisting torsos and extended limbs. The painter Edgar Degas (1834–1917) labeled Chéret the “Watteau de la rue” (Watteau of the street).
Chéret worked directly on the stone, in contrast to the standard practice whereby an artist’s design was executed on the stones by craftsmen. During the 1880s he used a black line with the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue). He achieved a graphic vitality with these bright colors, and subtle overprinting allowed an astonishing range of colors and effects; stipple and crosshatch, soft watercolor-like washes and bold calligraphic chunks of color, scratching, scraping, and splattering—all were used in his work. His typical composition is a central figure or figures in animated gesture, surrounded by swirls of color, secondary figures or props, and bold lettering that often echoes the shapes and gestures of the figure. His unending production for music halls and the theater, beverages and medicines, household products, entertainers, and publications transformed the walls of Paris (Figs. 11–9 and 11–10).
The beautiful young women he created, dubbed “Chérettes” by an admiring public, were archetypes—not only for the idealized presentation of women in mass media but for a generation of French women who used their dress and apparent lifestyle as inspiration. One pundit called Chéret “the father of women’s liberation” because he introduced a new role model for women in the late Victorian era. Roles for women were limited to the proper lady in the drawing room and the trollop in the bordello, when into this dichotomy swept the Chérettes. Neither prudes nor prostitutes, these self-assured, happy women enjoyed life to the fullest, wearing low-cut dresses, dancing, drinking wine, and even smoking in public. While Chéret preferred the large format, saying that because “a well-made woman is about 150 centimeters, a poster 240 centimeters in length affords ample space for drawing a figure full length,” his output ranged from life-size images to the diminutive.
Chéret was named to the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1890 for creating a new branch of art that advanced printing and served the needs of commerce and industry. He had designed over a thousand posters by the turn of the century, when his poster production nearly ceased and he spent more time on pastels and paintings. He retired to Nice, where the Jules Chéret Museum opened, preserving his work, shortly before his death at age ninety-seven.
Swiss-born Grasset was the first illustrator/designer to rival Chéret in public popularity. Grasset had studied medieval art intensely, and this influence, mingled with a love of exotic Asian art, was reflected strongly in his designs for furniture, stained glass, textiles, and books. A bellwether achievement, both in graphic design and printing technology, was the 1883 publication of Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (Tale of the Four Sons of Aymon) (Figs. 11–11 and 11–12), designed and illustrated by Grasset. It was printed in an aquatint-grain/color-photo relief process from plates made by Charles Gillot, who transformed Grasset’s line and watercolor designs into subtle, full-color printed book illustrations. Grasset and Gillot collaborated closely on this two-year project, with Grasset working extensively on the plates. The design is important for its total integration of illustrations, format, and typography. Grasset’s design ideas were rapidly assimilated after publication, including the decorative borders framing the contents, the integration of illustration and text into a unit, and the design of illustrations so that typography was printed over skies and other areas. Spatial segmentation was used as an expressive component in the page layouts.
In 1886 Grasset received his first poster commission. His willowy maidens, who wore long, flowing robes and struck static poses to advertise inks, chocolates, and beer, soon began to grace French streets. Figure 11–13 illustrates what has been called his “coloring-book style” of thick black contour drawing locking forms into flat areas of color in a manner similar to medieval stained glass windows. His figures echo Botticelli and wear medieval clothing; his stylized, flat cloud patterns reflect his knowledge of Japanese woodblocks. Grasset’s formal composition and muted color contrasted strongly with Chéret’s informally composed, brightly colored work. In spite of Grasset’s tradition-bound attitude, his flowing line, subjective color, and ever-present floral motifs pointed toward French art nouveau. His oeuvre included wallpaper and fabric design, stained glass windows, typefaces, and printer’s ornaments.
English art nouveau
In England the art nouveau movement was primarily concerned with graphic design and illustration rather than architectural and product design. Its sources, in addition to those listed earlier, included Gothic art and Victorian painting. A strong momentum toward an international style was created by the April 1893 inaugural issue of The Studio, the first of nearly a dozen new 1890s European art periodicals. The April issue of The Studio reproduced the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) (Fig. 11–14). Early issues of The Studio also included work by Walter Crane (an early innovator in the application of Japanese ornamental pattern and Eastern interpretations of nature to the design of surface pattern) and furniture and textiles produced for the Liberty and Company store.
Aubrey Beardsley was the enfant terrible of art nouveau, with his striking pen line, vibrant black-and-white work, and shockingly exotic imagery. A strange cult figure, he was intensely prolific for five years before dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-six. He had become famous at age twenty, when his illustrations and binding for a new edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (Figs. 11–15, 11–16, and 11–17) began to appear in monthly installments, augmenting a strong Kelmscott influence with strange and imaginative distortions of the human figure and powerful black shapes. “The black spot” was the name given to compositions based on a dominant black form. Beardsley synthesized Japanese block prints and William Morris into a new idiom. His unique line was reproduced by the photoengraving process, which, unlike the hand-cut woodblock, retained complete fidelity to the original art.
Morris was so angry when he saw Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur that he considered legal action. Beardsley had, to Morris’s mind, vulgarized the design ideas of the Kelmscott style (Fig. 11–18) by replacing the formal, naturalistic borders with more stylized, flat patterns. Walter Crane, always ready with an unequivocal viewpoint, declared that Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur had mixed the medieval spirit of Morris with a weird “Japanese-like spirit of deviltry and the grotesque,” which Crane thought fit only for the opium den.
In spite of Morris’s anger, the enthusiastic response to Beardsley’s work resulted in numerous commissions. He was named art editor for the Yellow Book, a magazine whose bright yellow cover on London newsstands became a symbol for the new and outrageous. In 1894 Oscar Wilde’s Salomé received widespread notoriety for the obvious erotic sensuality of Beardsley’s illustrations (Fig. 11–19). Late Victorian English society was shocked by this celebration of evil, which reached its peak in Beardsley’s work for an edition of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. Banned by English censors, it was widely circulated on the Continent.
During the last two years of his life, Beardsley was an invalid. When he could work, the flat patterns and dynamic curves of art nouveau yielded to a more naturalistic tonal quality, and dotted contours softened the decisive line of his earlier work. Even as he declined toward a tragically early death, Beardsley’s lightning influence penetrated the design and illustration practice of Europe and North America.
Beardsley’s leading rival among English graphic designers working in the wake of the Arts and Crafts movement and on the crest of art nouveau was Charles Ricketts (1866–1931), who maintained a lifelong collaboration with his close friend Charles Shannon (1863–1931). Ricketts began as a wood engraver and received training as a compositor; thus, his work was based on a thorough understanding of print production. While Beardsley tended to approach his works as illustrations to be inserted between pages of typography, Ricketts approached the book as a total entity, focusing upon a harmony of the parts: binding, end sheets, title page, typography, ornaments, and illustrations (which were frequently commissioned from Shannon). After working as an engraver and designer for several printing firms, Ricketts established his own studio and publishing firm.
In 1893 Ricketts’s first total book design appeared, and the following year he produced his masterly design for Oscar Wilde’s exotic and perplexing poem The Sphinx (Figs. 11–20 and 11–21). Although Ricketts owed a debt to Morris, he usually rejected the density of Kelmscott design. His page layouts are lighter, his ornaments and bindings more open and geometric (Fig. 11–22), and his designs have a vivid luminosity. The complex, intertwining ornament of Celtic design and the flat, stylized figures painted on Greek vases, which he studied in the British Museum, were major inspirations. From them, Ricketts, like Beardsley, learned how to indicate figures and clothing with minimal lines and flat shapes with no tonal modulation.
In 1896 Ricketts launched the Vale Press. Unlike Morris, Ricketts did not own a press or do his own printing and instead placed his typesetting and presswork with printing firms that followed his exacting requirements. When Morris was shown Vale Press books during his final illness, he cried in admiration of the great beauty of Ricketts’s volumes.
The further development of French art nouveau
During the 1880s Grasset was a regular at Rodolphe Salis’s Le Chat Noir nightclub, a gathering place for artists and writers that opened in 1881. There he met and shared his enthusiasm for color printing with younger artists: Georges Auriol (1863–1938), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), and fellow Swiss artist Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923).
Even Jules Chéret had to concede that Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1891 poster “La Goulue au Moulin Rouge” broke new ground in poster design (Fig. 11–23). A dynamic pattern of flat planes—black spectator’s silhouettes, yellow ovals for lamps, and the stark white undergarments of the notorious cancan dancer, who performed with transparent or slit underwear—move horizontally across the center of the poster. In front of this is the profile of the dancer Valentin, known as “the boneless one” because of his amazing flexibility. In this milestone of poster design, simplified symbolic shapes and dynamic spatial relationships form expressive and communicative images.
The son of the count of Toulouse, Toulouse-Lautrec had turned obsessively to drawing and painting after breaking both hips in an accident at age thirteen. Further growth of his legs was stunted, leaving him crippled. He became a master draftsman in the academic tradition after moving to Paris two years later. Japanese art, impressionism, and Degas’s design and contour excited him, and he haunted Paris cabarets and bordellos, watching, drawing, and developing a journalistic, illustrative style that captured the night life of la belle époque (“the beautiful era”), a term used to describe glittering late nineteenth-century Paris. Primarily a printmaker, draftsman, and painter, Toulouse-Lautrec produced only thirty-one posters (Figs. 11–24, 11–25. 11–26, and 11–27), the commissions for which were negotiated in the cabarets in the evenings, and a modest number of music- and book-jacket designs. Drawing directly on the lithographic stone, he often worked from memory with no sketches and used an old toothbrush that he always carried to achieve tonal effects through a splatter technique.
There is an affinity, in the fluid reportorial line and flat color, between the posters and prints of Steinlen and those of his friend and sometime rival for commissions, Toulouse-Lautrec. The debate over which one influenced the other is irrelevant, because Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec drew inspiration from similar sources and each other.
Steinlen arrived in Paris at age twenty-two with his young wife, a great love of drawing, and a mania for cats. His first Paris commissions were cat drawings for Le Chat Noir (Fig. 11–28). Steinlen was a prolific illustrator during the 1880s and 1890s, and his radical political views, socialist affiliations, and anticlerical stance led him toward a social realism depicting poverty, exploitation, and the working class. His black-and-white lithographs often had color printed by a stencil process. His vast oeuvre includes over two thousand magazine covers and interior illustrations, nearly two hundred sheet-music covers, over a hundred book-illustration assignments, and three dozen large posters.
Although his first color poster was designed in 1885, his legacy is based on masterworks of the 1890s. His 236 by 305 centimeter multipanel poster for the printer Charles Verneau (Fig. 11–29) mirrored the pedestrians on adjacent Parisian sidewalks in nearly life-size, environmental scale. Remarkable tenderness was displayed in a dairy poster illustrating his hungry cats demanding a share of his daughter Colette’s bowl of milk (Fig. 11–30).
The young Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) had shown remarkable drawing ability when he was growing up in the small Moravian village of Ivancice. After journeying to Paris at age twenty-seven, Mucha spent two years studying while supported by a benefactor. This financial support ended suddenly, and a period of dire poverty ensued. But Mucha gained steady acceptance as a dependable illustrator with strong drawing skills.
On Christmas Eve 1894, Mucha was at the Lemerciers’ printing company, dutifully correcting proofs for a friend who had taken a holiday. Suddenly the printing firm’s manager burst into the room, upset because the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt was demanding a new poster for the play Gismonda by New Year’s Day. As Mucha was the only artist available, he received the commission. Using the basic pose from Grasset’s earlier poster for Bernhardt in Joan of Arc (Fig. 11–31) and sketches of Bernhardt made at the theater, Mucha elongated Grasset’s format, used Byzantine-inspired mosaics as background motifs, and produced a poster totally distinct from any of his prior work (Fig. 11–32). The bottom portion of this poster was unfinished because only a week was available for design, printing, and posting. Because of its complexity and muted colors, Mucha’s work lacked Chéret’s impact from afar. But once they stepped closer, Parisians were astounded.
On New Year’s Day 1895, as Mucha began his meteoric rise, a number of trends throughout Europe were converging into what would be labeled art nouveau. Although Mucha resisted this label, maintaining that art was eternal and could never be new, the further development of his work and of the visual poster are inseparably linked to this diffuse international movement and must be considered part of its development. Just as the English Arts and Crafts movement was a special influence on that country’s art nouveau, the light and fanciful flowing curves of eighteenth-century French rococo were a special resource in France. The new art was hailed as le style moderne until December 1895, when Siegfried Bing (1838–1905; also known as Samuel Bing), a longtime dealer in Far Eastern art and artifacts who fostered the growing awareness of Japanese work, opened his new gallery, Salon de l’Art Nouveau, to exhibit art and crafts by young artists working in new directions. Bing commissioned the Belgian architect and designer Henri Clemens van de Velde (1863–1957) to design his interiors, and exhibited painting, sculpture, glasswork, jewelry, and posters by an international group of artists and designers.
Graphic design, more ephemeral and timely than most other art forms, began to move rapidly toward the floral phase of art nouveau as Chéret, Grasset, Toulouse-Lautrec, and especially Mucha developed its graphic motifs. From 1895 until 1900, art nouveau found its most comprehensive statement in Mucha’s work. His dominant theme was a central female figure surrounded by stylized forms derived from plants and flowers, Moravian folk art, Byzantine mosaics, and even magic and the occult. So pervasive was his work that by 1900, le style Mucha was often used interchangeably with l’art nouveau. (The new art was called Jugendstil, after the magazine Jugend [Youth] in Germany, Sezessionstil, after the Vienna Secession art movement in Austria; stile floreale or stile Liberty after textiles and furnishings from the London department store in Italy; modernismo in Spain, and Nieuwe Kunst in the Netherlands.)
Mucha’s women project an archetypal sense of unreality. Exotic and sensuous while retaining an aura of innocence, they express no specific age, nationality, or historical period. His stylized hair patterns (Figs. 11–33, 11–34 and 11–35) became a hallmark of the era in spite of detractors who dismissed this aspect of his work as “noodles and spaghetti.” Sarah Bernhardt, who had not been pleased with Grasset’s Joan of Arc poster or many other posters for her performances, felt that Mucha’s Gismonda poster expressed her so well graphically that she signed him to a six-year contract for sets, costumes, jewelry, and nine more posters. The sheer volume of Mucha’s output was astounding. In addition to graphics, Mucha designed furniture, carpets, stained glass windows, and manufactured objects. His pattern books—including Combinaisons ornementales (Ornamental Combinations) (Fig. 11–36), produced in collaboration with Maurice Verneuil (1869–1942) and Georges Auriol (1863–1938)—helped spread the art nouveau style. There were also numerous Dutch books that provided instructive patterns in the art nouveau style.
In 1904, at the height of his fame, Mucha left Paris for his first American visit. His last major art nouveau work was executed in 1909. After Czechoslovakia became an independent nation in 1917, Mucha’s time and work were centered there. His Slav Epic, a series of twenty large murals, depicted the history of his people. After Germany partitioned Czechoslovakia in 1939, Mucha was one of the first people arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, and he died a few months later.
Although Emmanuel Orazi (1860–1934) came to prominence as a poster designer in 1884, when he designed a poster for Sarah Bernhardt, it was not until his static style yielded to the influences of Grasset and Mucha a decade later that he produced his best work. An example is his poster for La Maison Moderne (The Modern House) (Fig. 11–37), a gallery competing with Bing’s Salon de l’Art Nouveau. A sophisticated young lady, drawn in an almost Egyptian profile, is posed before a counter bearing objects from the gallery. The logo centered in the window typifies the many applications of art nouveau letterforms to trademark design. Many trademarks of art nouveau origin (Fig. 11–38) have been in continuous use since the 1890s.
Art nouveau comes to America
British and French graphic art soon joined forces to invade America. In 1889, and again in 1891 and 1892, Harper’s magazines commissioned covers from Eugène Grasset (Fig. 11–39). These first presentations of a new approach to graphic design were literally imported, for Grasset’s designs were printed in Paris and shipped by boat to New York to be bound onto the magazines. The visual poster was adopted by the American publishing industry, and colorful placards began to appear at the newsstands advertising the new books and major magazines, including Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Century.
British-born Louis Rhead (1857–1926) studied in his native England and then in Paris before immigrating to America in 1883. After eight years in New York as an illustrator, he returned to Europe for three years and adopted Grasset’s style. Upon his return to America, a prolific flow of posters, magazine covers (Fig. 11–40), and illustrations enabled him to join the self-taught American William (Will) H. Bradley (1868–1962) as one of the two major American practitioners of art nouveau–inspired graphic design and illustration.
Although Rhead embraced Grasset’s willowy maidens, contour line, and flat color, he rejected his pale colors in favor of vibrantly unexpected combinations, such as red contour lines on bright blue hair before an intense green sky. Rhead’s eclectic style sometimes mixed a profusion of influences. Decorative embellishments from Victorian designs, forms inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, and curving, abstract linear patterns were sometimes combined in his designs. Although Rhead adopted the French poster as his model, the energetic and enormously talented Will Bradley was inspired by English sources. Shortly after the death of his father, nine-year-old Bradley moved with his mother from Massachusetts to Ishpeming, Michigan, to live with relatives. His early training in graphic arts began at age eleven, when he became an apprentice for the Iron Agitator (later the Iron Ore) newspaper. When Bradley was seventeen, he used his fifty-dollar savings to go to Chicago and apprentice at Rand McNally as an engraver. Realizing that engravers did not design or illustrate, and that illustrators and designers did not engrave, he returned briefly to Ishpeming. But Chicago soon beckoned again, and he became a typographic designer at the Knight & Leonard printing company when he was nineteen.
Unable to afford art lessons, Bradley became a voracious student of magazines and library books. As with Frederic Goudy and Bruce Rogers, William Morris and his ideals had an enormous impact on Bradley. By 1890 his Arts and Crafts–inspired pen-and-ink illustrations were bringing regular commissions. In early 1894 Bradley became aware of Beardsley’s work, which led him toward flat shapes and stylized contour. Beginning in 1894, Bradley’s work for the Inland Printer, a trade journal devoted to commercial printing (Figs. 11–41 and 11–42), and the Chap Book, a literary magazine (Fig. 11–43), ignited art nouveau in America. His cover designs for the Inland Printer changed monthly, an approach that Bradley would later claim was a first for an American magazine. His detractors dismissed him as “the American Beardsley,” but Bradley used Beardsley’s style as a stepping-stone to fresh graphic technique and a visual unity of type and image that moved beyond imitation. He made innovative use of photomechanical techniques to produce repeated, overlapping, and reversed images.
Bradley was inventive in his approach to typographic design and flouted all the prevailing rules and conventions. Type became a design element to be squeezed into a narrow column or letterspaced so that lines containing various numbers of letters became the same length and formed a rectangle. Inspired by the Kelmscott Press, Bradley established the Wayside Press after moving from Chicago to Springfield, Massachusetts, in late 1894. He also created designs for other publishers, such as the binding for The Quest of the Golden Girl for the publisher John Lane in New York (Fig. 11–44). He produced books and advertisements (Fig. 11–45) and began publication of an art and literary periodical, Bradley: His Book, in 1896. Both the magazine and the press were critical and financial successes, but the rigors and many roles involved in running them—editor, designer, illustrator, press manager—threatened Bradley’s health. In 1898 he sold Wayside Press to the University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and accepted a position there.
During an 1895 visit to the Boston Public Library, Bradley studied its collection of chapbooks, small, crudely printed books from colonial New England named after chapmen, the traveling peddlers who sold them. The vigor of these works, with their Caslon types, wide letterspacing, mix of roman, italic, and all-capital type, sturdy woodcuts, and plain rules, inspired the beginnings of a new direction in graphic arts that became known as the chapbook style. After the turn of the century Bradley became a consultant to the American Type Founders, designing typefaces and ornaments. He wrote and designed their series of twelve little books, The American Chap-Book (Fig. 11–46).
A growing passion for type design and layout led Bradley to become art editor of Collier’s magazine in 1907. His subsequent redesign for the magazine was later credited with improving sales drastically. At Collier’s, Bradley often hired J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951), Edward Penfield (1866–1925), and Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) for freelance illustration jobs, while his own illustrations became characterized by a humorous storybook style (Figs. 11–47). In addition to his success in magazine design and art direction, Bradley also created book promotions and advertisements for a variety of clients. During the last decades of his career Bradley made significant contributions to the evolution of twentieth-century editorial design for William Randolph Hearst publications such as Good Housekeeping and the Century magazine.
Ethel Reed (b. 1876) was the first American woman to achieve national prominence as a graphic designer and illustrator (Fig. 11–48). Born and raised in Massachusetts, she became well known as a book illustrator and poster designer at age eighteen. For four brief years (1894–98) she created posters and illustrations for Boston publishers Copeland & Day, while Lamson, Wolffe and Company produced her last poster in London in 1898. Her disappearance from the historical record at age twenty-two remains a mystery.
An art director for Harper and Brothers publications from 1891 until 1901, Edward Penfield (1866–1925) enjoyed a reputation rivaling that of Bradley and Rhead. Penfield studied at the Art Student’s League from 1889 to 1895 under George deForest Brush, a well-known instructor who had trained in Paris and aided the spread of European styles in America. Penfield’s monthly series of posters for Harper’s magazine from 1893 until 1898 were directed toward the affluent members of society, frequently depicting them reading or carrying an issue of the magazine. During the course of that year, Penfield evolved toward his mature style of contour drawing with flat planes of color. By eliminating the background, he forced the viewer to focus on the figure and lettering, a technique likely showing the influence of Japanese prints (Fig. 11–49). Penfield drew with a vigorous, fluid line, and his flat color planes were often supplemented by a masterly stipple technique (Fig. 11–50). In an 1897 poster (Fig. 11–51), everyone on a train, including the conductor, is reading Harper’s. Penfield’s Harper’s campaign was wildly successful, and competitive publications commissioned imitative designs revealing a reading public absorbed in their magazines. William Carqueville (1871–1946) created similar posters for Lippincott’s magazine, including one for the January 1895 issue featuring a girl lost in thought after reading a passage from Lippincott’s (Fig. 11–52).
Several younger artists of the 1890s poster movement were to become major illustrators for magazines and books during the twentieth century. Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) was rejected as a student by the well-known Brandywine School instructor Howard Pyle, who told young Parrish that there was nothing more that Pyle could teach him and that he should develop an independent style. Parrish expressed a romantic and idealized view of the world (Fig. 11–53) in book, magazine, and advertising illustrations during the first three decades of the twentieth century before turning to painting landscapes for reproduction. Parrish created an elegant land of fantasy with his idealized drawing, pristine color, and intricate composition.
Innovation in Belgium and the Netherlands
Belgium experienced the beginnings of creative ferment during the 1880s, when the Cercle des XX (Group of Twenty) formed to show progressive art ignored by the salon establishment, including paintings by Gauguin in 1889 and Van Gogh in 1890. The cover design for a Les Vingt (The Twenty) exhibition catalogue by Georges Lemmen (1865–1916) in 1891 demonstrates that Belgian artists were at the vanguard in the movement toward a new art (Fig. 11–54). By the mid-1890s Belgian art nouveau became a significant force, as architect Baron Victor Horta and designer Henri van de Velde were influencing developments throughout Europe.
Van de Velde, an architect, painter, designer, and educator, synthesized sources such as Japanese prints, French art nouveau, the English Arts and Crafts movement, and, later, the Glasgow School into a unified style. After exploring postimpressionism, including pointillism, he studied architecture and joined the Cercle des XX. Morris’s example inspired his increasing involvement in design, and Van de Velde soon abandoned painting. Interiors, book design, bookbinding, jewelry, and metalwork became major activities. In 1892 Van de Velde wrote an important essay, “Déblaiement d’art,” calling for a new art that would be contemporary in concept and form but possess the vitality and ethical integrity of the great decorative and applied arts of the past.
In applying this approach to graphic design, Van de Velde became a precursor of twentieth-century painting, foretelling the coming of Kandinsky and abstract expression. His only poster was for a concentrated food product, Tropon, for which he created labeling and advertising in 1899 (Fig. 11–55). Rather than communicating information about the product or depicting people using it, Van de Velde engaged the viewer with symbolic form and color. His 1908 book designs for Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) (Fig. 11–56) and Ecce Homo were masterworks.
Although Van de Velde became an innovator of art nouveau, he was far more interested in furthering the Arts and Crafts philosophy than in visual invention as an end in itself. After the turn of the century, his teaching and writing (The Renaissance in Modern Applied Art, 1901; A Layman’s Sermons on Applied Art, 1903) became a vital source for the development of twentieth-century architecture and design theory. He taught that all branches of art—from painting to graphic design, from industrial design to sculpture—share a common language of form and are of equal importance to the human community. They all demand appropriate materials, functional forms, and a unity of visual organization. He saw ornament not as decoration but as a means of expression that could achieve the status of art.
Machine-made objects, Van de Velde argued, should be true to their manufacturing process instead of trying, deceitfully, to appear handmade. After the grand duke of Saxe Weimar called Van de Velde to Weimar as an art and design adviser in 1902, he reorganized the Weimar Arts and Crafts Institute and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, a preliminary step toward Walter Gropius’s formation of the Bauhaus in 1919 (see chapter 16). When World War I broke out, Van de Velde returned to his native country. In 1925 the Belgian government expressed its appreciation by naming Van de Velde director of the Institut Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels.
Other 1890s Belgian graphic designers added their own variations to the new art. After six years in Paris, Privet Livemont (1861–1936) returned to his native Belgium. A teacher and painter, he produced nearly three dozen posters and was strongly inspired by Mucha’s idealized women, their tendrilous hair, and their lavish ornament. His major innovation was a double contour separating the figure from the background. His posters were often outlined by a thick, white band, which increased the image’s impact when posted on billboards (Figs. 11–57 and 11–58). Gisbert Combaz (1869–1941)
left the practice of law to become an artist and art historian specializing in the Far East. He was a leading member of La Libre Esthétique, the organization that evolved from the Cercle des XX in 1893. His many exhibition posters for this group feature intense color and pushed the art nouveau arabesque into an almost mechanical, tense line (Fig. 11–59).
In the Netherlands, Nieuwe Kunst spanned roughly the fourteen years between 1892 and 1906. Through Nieuwe Kunst many young Dutch artists sought new vistas with energy and enthusiasm, encouraged by fresh, optimistic, and progressive ideals. They brought about an important artistic revival in the Netherlands that provided the seeds for future movements such as De Stijl, art deco, and what is now known as the Wendingen style.
The book was one of the principal expressive media of Nieuwe Kunst. Some special qualities of the movement’s book design are unpredictability, eccentricity, openness, and innovation. It also reflects a love for order and geometry, balanced by a penchant for the primitive and independence from accepted norms.
In comparison to art nouveau book design in other European countries, Nieuwe Kunst was more playful and diverse. Although they ignored the actual relationship of plant and flower forms to the picture plane, some artists were faithful to nature in depicting these forms. Eventually there emerged an abstract approach where undulating and swerving lines were united into intricate patterns. After 1895, mathematics was seen as a creative source in itself, with symmetry and rationalism each playing a part.
Of particular importance to the Nieuwe Kunst movement were influences from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The Dutch had a bond with their overseas colonies that was quite different from that of other colonial powers. Dutch artists readily assimilated East Indian motifs and techniques.
The interest in natural and mathematical forms engendered a number of books on adapting these to stylized decoration. One of the most popular was Driehoeken bij ontwerpen van ornament (Triangles in the Design of Ornament), by J. H. de Groot, a teacher at the Quellinus arts and crafts school in Amsterdam, and his sister Jacoba M. de Groot. Published in a large edition in 1896, it reached a broad audience and exerted much influence. Providing artists with vivid instructions for the construction of abstract forms based on nature, in fifty plates accompanied by descriptive texts it demonstrated that almost any imaginable figure could be created from variations of thirty- and forty-five-degree triangles. It is no coincidence that theosophy, in which geometry is seen as an ordering principle of the cosmos, was popular in the Netherlands during this period (Fig. 11–60).
The introduction of batik as a contemporary design medium was one of the important contributions of the Netherlands to the international art nouveau movement. Batik-making had long been a traditional craft for women in the Dutch East Indies. The lush and organic designs of Javanese batik greatly inspired artists such as Chris Lebeau (1878–1945) and Jan Toorop (1858–1928), and this flat-pattern design soon evolved into a distinctive Dutch national style.
Chris Lebeau produced some of the most striking and complex designs in batik and was successful in assimilating traditional patterns and colors of the East Indies into his own work. In 1900 the publisher Lambertus Jacobus Veen commissioned Lebeau to design the binding for De stille kracht (The Quiet Power), the most heavily East Indian of all the novels by The Hague writer Louis Couperus (Fig. 11–61). In October 1900, the definitive design for De stille kracht was produced in batik and then stamped in gold before being made into the binding. On the back both the binder and the batik studio are cited, an unusual gesture in this period. Although the design suggests flowers, it was actually made according to a mathematical system based on diamond shapes. De stille kracht was a large edition that reached thousands of readers, and as a result Lebeau and Veen were largely responsible for the popularity of batik in the Netherlands.
Jan Toorop was born on the Dutch East Indies island of Java and at the age of thirteen left to study in the Netherlands. He eventually studied at the polytechnic school at Delft, the Amsterdam Academy, and the École des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels. For Toorop, Javanese culture was a natural source of inspiration. His use of the silhouette, his linear style, and the forms, expressions, and hairstyles of his female figures are derived from Javanese wajan shadow puppets. This Javanese influence is clear in his 1895 poster for Delftsche Slaolie (Delft Salad Oil), which is dominated by two enigmatic female figures, a design that brought him acclaim in decorative art circles (Fig. 11–62).
Veen was a personal friend of Toorop and gave him many binding commissions. His 1898 binding for Psyche, one of the many designs for Louis Couperus, shows his skill in combining text with illustration. The design is filled with Toorop’s “whiplash” lines, and the lettering, especially on the spine, blends in with the illustration (Fig. 11–63).
And last, there were those exacting designers who found refuge in the familiar solidity of geometry. Here decorative ornaments are derived predominantly from mathematics, and books such as Driehoeken bij ontwerpen van ornament were sources of inspiration. An outstanding example is De vrouwen kwestie, haar historische ontwikkeling en haar economische kant (The Woman Question, Her Historical Development and Her Economic Side), by Lily Braun, designed in 1902 by S. H. de Roos (Fig. 11–64).
By 1903, the glory and excitement of the experimental period of Nieuwe Kunst showed clear signs of having run its course as the movement assumed an established form, and by 1910 Nieuwe Kunst had sadly digressed into mainly vapid commercial devices. In the end the original discoveries were taken over by those who only saw their superficial appeal and continued to exploit them as fashionable decorative styles, easy to manipulate and applicable to almost any goal.
The German Jugendstil movement
When art nouveau arrived in Germany it was called Jugendstil (youth style) after a new magazine, Jugend (Youth), founded by writer, journalist, and publisher Georg Hirth in Munich in 1896. From Munich, Jugendstil spread to Berlin, Darmstadt, and all over Germany. German art nouveau had strong French and British influences, but it also retained strong links to traditional academic art. The German interest in medieval letterforms—Germany was the only European country that did not replace Gutenberg’s textura type with the roman styles of the Renaissance—continued side by side with art nouveau motifs.
During Jugend’s first year, its circulation climbed to thirty thousand copies per week, and the magazine soon attracted a readership of two hundred thousand per week. Art nouveau ornaments and illustrations were on virtually every editorial page. Full double-page illustrations, horizontal illustrations across the top of a page, and decorative art nouveau designs brought rich variety to a format that was about half visual material and half text. One unprecedented editorial policy was to allow each week’s cover designer to design a masthead to go with the cover design (Fig. 11–65). Over the course of a year, the Jugend logo appeared variously as giant textura letters, tendrilous art nouveau lettering, or just as the word Jugend set in twenty-four-point typography above the image because that week’s designer had ignored or forgotten the need to include the logotype in the design. In the cover design for October 1899 by Hans Christiansen (1866–1945), a leading artist associated with Jugend, the simple, sans-serif letterforms are drawn in constrained, pale colors (Fig. 11–66); the images are contrasting planes of warm and cool colors. Large-scale ornamentation ranged from Peter Behrens’s (1868–1940) abstract designs (Fig. 11–67) inspired by ancient Egyptian artifacts to stylized floral designs.
Along with Otto Eckmann (1865–1902), Behrens became widely known for large, multicolor woodblock prints (Fig. 11–68) inspired by French art nouveau and Japanese prints. In addition to five cover illustrations and numerous decorative borders for Jugend, Eckmann designed jewelry, objects, furniture, women’s fashions, and an important typeface called Eckmannschrift. He became a designer and consultant for the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electric Company), or AEG, and explored the application of Jugendstil ornament to the graphic and product needs of industry (Fig. 11–69).
The Klingspor Foundry in Offenbach am Main was the first German type foundry to commission new fonts from artists, and in 1900 it released Eckmann’s Eckmannschrift (Fig. 11–70), which created a sensation and thrust this small regional foundry into international prominence. Drawn with a brush instead of a pen, Eckmannschrift was a conscious attempt to revitalize typography by combining medieval and roman. As the new century opened, Eckmann seemed poised to play a major role in the further evolution of design, but in 1902 the thirty-seven-year-old designer succumbed to the tuberculosis that had plagued him for years.
In addition to his work for Jugend, Peter Behrens experimented with ornaments and vignettes of abstract design through two other publications, Der Bunte Vogel and Die Insel. He became artistic adviser to Die Insel and its publisher, Insel-Verlag, for which he designed one of the finest Jugendstil trademarks (Fig. 11–71). Die Insel was not illustrated, and Behrens gave it a consistent typographic format and program using Old Style typefaces.
The primary German contribution to the development of early twentieth-century modern design was not Jugendstil, but the innovations that developed in reaction to it as architects and designers, including Peter Behrens, became influenced by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, purged of its medieval affectations. Designers in Germany, Scotland, and Austria moved rapidly from the floral phase of art nouveau toward a more geometric and objective approach. This accompanied a shift from swirling organic line and form to a geometric ordering of space. (The birth of this modernist design sensibility is discussed in chapter 12.)
The Italian pictorial tradition
At the turn of the century, Italian posters were characterized by a sensuous exuberance and elegance rivaling that of la belle époque in France. For twenty-five years, the Milan firm of Giulio Ricordi, previously known for publishing opera librettos, produced most of the masterpieces of Italian poster design. Ricordi’s director was the German-born Adolfo Hohenstein (1854–1928), and like Chéret in France, Hohenstein is seen as the father of poster design in Italy (Fig. 11–72). Working under him were some of the best poster artists in Italy, including Leopoldo Metlicovitz (1868–1944) (Fig. 11–73), Giovanni Mataloni (1869–1944) (Fig. 11–74), and Marcello Dudovich (1878–1962) (Fig. 11–75). Dudovich was an eclectic designer who eventually arrived at a unique colorful style. Like Hohlwein in Germany, he preferred elegant subjects presented in flat areas of color. Together with artists such as the Polish-born Franz Laskoff (1869–1918) (Fig. 11–76) and Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942) (Fig. 11–77), he was a popular designer for the fashionable Mele department store in Naples, an important Ricordi client that commissioned over 120 posters.
The English art historian Herbert Read once suggested that the life of any art movement is like that of a flower. A budding in the hands of a small number of innovators is followed by full bloom; the process of decay begins as the influence becomes diffused and distorted in the hands of imitators who understand merely the stylistic manifestations of the movement rather than the driving passions that forged it. After the turn of the century, this was the fate of art nouveau. Early art nouveau objects and furniture had been primarily one-of-a-kind or limited-edition items. But as the design of posters and periodicals brought art nouveau to an ever-widening circle, far greater quantities were produced. Some manufacturers focused on the bottom line by turning out vast amounts of merchandise and graphics with lower design standards. Lesser talents copied the style, while many innovators moved on in other directions. Art nouveau slowly declined until it vanished in the ashes of World War I, the political and nationalist forces thrusting Europe toward global war having made its aesthetic joie de vivre irrelevant.
Art nouveau’s legacy is a tracery of the dreams and lifestyles of a brief Indian summer in the human saga. Its offspring were twentieth-century designers who adopted not its surface appearance, but its attitudes toward materials, processes, and value.